Empirical Study On The Requirement Of "Seeking Benefits For Others" In Bribery Crime

In China,the description of "seeking benefits for others" appears in the content of the constitutive elements of the bribery crime in chapter 8 of the criminal law,that is,the crime of accepting sexual bribery must have the situation that the behavior is to obtain benefits for the briber in order to constitute a crime.Since China’s criminal law stipulated this requirement in article 385 in 1997,the disputes about judicial recognition of this requirement in judicial practice have been endless in the theoretical and practical circles.In 1989,the supreme people’s court and the supreme people’s procuratorate issued the solution on punishing corruption and bribery crimes,and in 1997,China’s criminal law and in 2003,the supreme people’s court issued the chongqing meeting minutes,which all involved the interpretation of “seeking benefits for others”.For decades,the academic circle has been disputing about the content of judicial determination of “seeking benefits for others” in these explanatory documents.On April 18,2016,the supreme people’s court and the supreme people’s procuratorate jointly issued the interpretation on several issues concerning the application of law in handling criminal cases of corruption and bribery,hereinafter referred to as the interpretation.Although article 13 of the interpretation makes a detailed explanation of the application of “seeking benefits for others”,there is still a big deviation in the understanding of the specific application of the interpretation.The current interpretation does not solve the theoretical “subjective and objective elements of the dispute,“knowing that there are specific matters” in practice,“knowing that” is abstract,fuzzy understanding or specific,clear understanding and other issues.Therefore,by observing the judgment samples,this paper finds that there are still big differences in the application of the above problems in judicial practice.In order to better understand and apply the interpretation,this paper,based on the reality of judicial practice,demonstrates the empirical research ideas and methods under the theory and judicial model,conducts an empirical analysis of the above two issues one by one and gives practical conclusions to verify their observations.This paper attempts to take the theoretical research on the elements of "seeking benefits for others" in the crime of bribery in existing domestic criminal jurisprudence as the basis to discover the controversial points,construct a judicial model to analyze and demonstrate the specific problems in judicial practice by usingpresupposition attitude factors,and substitute sample data into the model to verify the validity of presupposition conclusions.The verification of the preset conclusion shows the following phenomena :(1)from the observation of the reality that "seeking benefits for others" should be identified as subjective requirements or objective requirements,the judge will give priority to the use of objective requirements in the determination of general cases.When the objective phenomenon cannot directly reflect the illegal result in reality,the judge will determine it by the subjective requirement,and the judgment text presents the state of no requirement reflection in most cases.(2)from the observation of "knowing that there are specific matters for request" in the reasoning part of the judgment document,when the judge can directly and accurately see the criminal intention of accepting sexual bribery from the evidence and clearly explain the objective event,then the judge will determine knowing that according to the content of accurate and certain matters;When there is a long interval between the actual time of bribery and the time of seeking profits in the evidence,and the profits are not realized,the judge determines according to the general cognition.The analysis of the attitude model shows the following conclusions: when there are many disputes between the prosecution and the defense in the case,the case is relatively complex,and the evidence chain cannot directly reflect the objective facts,it will affect the judge’s attitude towards the judicial determination of legal issues in the judgment.It is expected to provide a certain perspective and empirical reference for China to weaken the requirement of “seeking benefits for others”.